University of Toronto CS department featured in ByteClub

The University of Toronto Computer Science department of which where my PhD comes from, is featured in this video from Byte Club which is a Toronto-based web show featuring technology companies and their culture:



It's a great show, showing the cool things in Computer Science happening in University of Toronto and what the students are doing. Who said Computer Science was just for geeks?

On Technorati: UniversityOfToronto, ComputerScience, ByteClub

Carla Ellis talk – Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Today, I attended the first Distinguished Lecture talk of 2008 in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. The talk was by Carla Ellis of the Computer Science department at Duke University. Her talk was on energy aware computing. Can computing contribute to energy conservation in non-computer environments? This was the major motivation towards her research. She reviewed how there is computational support for the science of global change for reducing energy demand. We have progressed far with energy management for computing from various levels. First, we have dealt with energy management at the hardware level with low-power circuit design. Second, the operating system has support for energy management such as detecting voltage changes and scaling. Third, there are policies that govern energy management in computing, with popular techniques being caching and prefetching. The operating system can spin the disk down when not in use, and we have energy management schemes for our laptops, like to conserve battery by decreasing the brightness of the display. Fourth, we have software for energy management, with much systems research dealing with this. Carla and her research group have built an energy-centric OS which is nicely called ECOSystem.

When coming up with an energy goal, it is important to know to be aware of the tradeoffs that can occur, like for example, the battery lifetime can be increased however the CPU may be downclocked to run at a lower speed, or there might be a sacrifice in performance. We need to know whether the tradeoffs are justified. In their project called ECOSystem, there is explicit managing of energy use to reach the target battery lifetime. The premise is to fully utilize the battery life within a set timeframe. The scenario that she used was that of a person being able to use the laptop all the way on a coast-to-coast flight across the country, like for example from Halifax to Vancouver. They use a unifying energy concept in ECOSystem which is called currentcy which is equal to current + currency to provide a cost model for energy. Their model is a pay as you go model, ie, you can use currentcy during an epoch. If there is no more currentcy, then there is no more service. Therefore, currentcy needs to be allocated amongst the resources, but care needs to be taken such that no resource hoards all the energy. Therefore, the energy needs to be distributed evenly for the task at hand. As part of the ECOSystem, there is currentcy-aware scheduling to determine which resources get allocated what amount of currentcy and up to how much (cap), as well as buffer management strategies and prefetching (common of all energy-aware computing research).

The second research area Carla described was that of context-aware energy computing in environments, in which at Duke University, there is a smart home with the newest technologies and “green” initiatives. Their problem was to count the number of people that walk through the doorway so that for example, lights could be switched off, if the last person leaves the room, or the thermostat can be adjusted so that it is not too hot in the room (which she mentioned could have been used in the lecture room she was talking in). In fact, she is taking her own research personally by building her own smart house, transferring research and technology into her own house.

The third research project that Carla next talked about was the soil-moisture forestry project in which she is working with biologists to measure soil moisture to determine when to sample and how to sample. Her research group is looking into soil moisture data and developing models to suppress transmission.

She concluded her talk by issuing a challenge to all computer scientists. Any subdiscipline of computer science can find research topics related to energy efficiency (like for example, using energy as a new metric for research), but not necessary having to go heavily into the area. There is need for interdisciplinary research and it is a challenge to do interdisciplinary research. There is a trend to support energy conservation in buildings and transportation systems, which shows the practical applications. She mentioned how collaborative applications can be written for more effective teleconferencing/telecommuting that exploit the energy conservation. She also mentioned that energy-aware applications can take technologies and research from software engineering, machine learning, and systems.

On Technorati: Carla Ellis, computer science

Mapping the sky

Here's an interesting article from a fellow Computer Science student at U of T called Dustin Lang. He's in the AI group with Sam Roweis, designing an astronomy engine that given an image, it will be able to spit out exactly what that image is. How they do it, is that they check the list of images in an astronomical database to see what it is similar to. This doesn't have to be limited to astronomy, I can think of many applications where I have an image that I've taken or seen before, but I don't know what exactly it is or where it came from. I could then do an image search to determine what that image exactly is. This is kind of the reverse of what image searching is now, where you give a keyword, and an image pops up.

It just shows you the many applications that Computer Science can be applied to, that you don't have to just do math and algorithms all the time.

On Technorati: sky mapping, Computer Science, U of T

Judea Pearl lecture at U of T today

Today, there is a talk jointly organized between the departments of Computer Science, Economics, Mathematics, Philosophy, Public Health Sciences and Statistics, by Judea Pearl who is a professor of Department of Computer Science at UCLA. Professor Pearl just was awarded an honorary doctorate degree at University of Toronto today. He is the father of journalist Daniel Pearl. His talk today is about the Mathematics of Causal Inference. He says that the explanation of causal inference is actually really simple and common sense.

Causal analysis deals with changes (dynamics) whereas probability and statistics deal with static relations. Causal and statistical concepts do not mix. Statistical concepts can be computed given the joint probability distribution. For example, regression and association/independence are statistical concepts. Statistical assumptions and data and causal assumptions combine to form causal conclusions. Causal assumptions cannot be expressed in the mathematical language of standard statistics. Causality then needs special mathematics. In high school algebra, we weren't allowed to wipe out equations, but in causality, you need to wipe out equations. Professor Pearl just mentioned that Computer Science is the science of daydreaming (amid smiles and laughter in the audience).

To make causality mathematical, we need to introduce counterfactuals.

The computer version of the Lord's Prayer

If you're Christian, you know about and recite the Lord's Prayer. Well, here is a version of that prayer translated into computer terminology. It's quite hilarious and comes from John Barry in 1993. It goes like this:
(funny that it comes from the ACM Review web site!)

The Computer Person’s Prayer

Our program, who art in Memory,
Hello be thy name.
Thy Operating System come,
thy commands be done,
at the Printer as they are on the Screen.
Give us this day our daily data,
and forgive us our I/O Errors as we forgive those whose Logic Circuits are faulty.
Lead us not into Frustration,
and deliver us from Power Surges.
For thine is the Algorithm,
The Application,
and the Solution,
looping forever and ever.
Return.

On Technorati: computer, Christianity

Tapan Parikh talk at CS at U of T

Tapan is giving a talk about Designing Appropriate Computing Technologies for the Rural Developing World, he is from the University of Washington.

Here is his abstract and bio:

Globalization has seen an increase in disparity between developed and
undeveloped regions. Disproportionate access to information
technology is a symptom and a factor contributing to this disparity.
In particular, people living in the rural developing world have many
information needs that could, but are not, being met by IT.
Technology for this context must be low-cost, accessible and
appropriate given the local infrastructure, including conditions of
intermittent power and connectivity. In this talk, I describe my
experiences developing CAM - a toolkit for mobile phone data
collection for the rural developing world. Designing technologies for
an unfamiliar context requires understanding the needs and
capabilities of potential users. Drawing from the results of an
extended design study conducted with microfinance group members in
rural India (many of whom are semi-literate or illiterate), I outline
a set of user interface design guidelines for accessibility to such
users. The results of this study are used to inform the design of
CAM, a mobile phone application toolkit including support for
paper-based interaction; multimedia input and output; and
disconnected operation. I provide evidence of CAM's usability,
breadth, and real-world applicability. Regarding real-world
applicability, a CAM application for microfinance data collection is
now being used by 17 NGO (non-governmental organization) to serve
over 10000 group members in two states of India. Regarding breadth, I
list some important rural data collection applications - including
for retail supply chain tracking, agricultural monitoring and health
care - that we have implemented, or can be implemented, using the CAM
toolkit. I conclude by discussing possible topics for future work and
my long-term research vision.

Bio: Tapan S. Parikh is an Intel Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate in the
Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of
Washington. Earlier, he received a M.S. degree in Computer Science
from UW and a Sc.B. degree with Honors in Molecular Modeling from
Brown University. Tapan's research interests include human-computer
interaction (HCI), systems engineering and information and
communication technologies for development (ICTD).

This talk is interesting to me because it has great relevance to applying technology to the rural developing world, that the urban communities take for granted. How can we solve the problems in rural areas using a mobile phone solution that deals with understanding context. The first part is understanding the context through a study that he is talking about how to provide financial services to the poor using computer technology. This study was done in India. Information can be the bridge between the formal and the informal. There is a need to design a system to make it accessible to users, and geographic. How to design a user interface for rural users who are semi-literate or illiterate? There was a test with a group of users, where the group hired a person to record the data on paper and pen. Then the paper representation was then reproduced as a software prototype on a laptop. For user response, there was a wide gap for looking at the computer and how to use the mouse to move around the screen. So in his design, he used icon buttons. Users then started to gain confidence after playing around with the user interface and clicking on buttons which would output in local language audio. I found that pretty interesting that illiterate users were able to work with the system, I can't even get my parents to try to use a computer!

The second part is to actually build the system. The solution that he used was the mobile phone which has a numeric keypad, speakers and microphone, is battery-operated and low cost. The HCI research community uses paper user interfaces for prototyping and leverage affordances of paper in digital user interfaces. But these approaches have had limited impact, and rural developing world may be the killer application for paper user interfaces. He created CAM, an application toolkit for mobile phones which includes a CAM browser and CAM scripting language to interact with the forms. The phone is used to capture the audio and images from paper, and then can review it on the phone for the user. The paper form has specific images that are captured and is associated with a particular action. Here's the paper of this that he presented at UIST 2005. This paper form that has special images which is captured by the phone, reminds me of the work by Intel Research Cambridge UK that dealt with capturing concentric circles on paper (like bar codes) and those correspond to performing a particular action. This is pretty neat, then there is no need to have to deploy something like RFID tags, because this is a low cost solution, and all phones now include a camera.

So how does this work in the field? He is now explaining about how he evaluated CAM. His results showed that the users performed significantly better with audio than textual prompts. The system has been deployed in India and commercialized by Ekgaon Technologies. CAM can also be applied to other field areas like agricultural monitoring.

His future work is looking into building a toolkit on top of CAM that allows local people to build their own solutions, and provide them with the tools and application development resources. The rural development using computer technology is now a hot area in many research institutions like UC Berkeley, Princeton/UW/MSR, MSR India, MIT Media Lab (with Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop per Child).

This is very interesting work, and he mentioned this motivates students and others to work on this to contribute to solving real world problems.

On Technorati: CAM, rural, cell phone, field work, HCI

Talking at U of T's CS undergrad open house today!

Today, I'm going to talk about my research as part of the Interactive Media Lab at the Computer Science undergraduate open house at U of T. I will be speaking to high school students and later will be having a poster which people can come and see my research. Should be fun, I love doing and participating in these type of events, and sharing and discussing my research. I'm really glad I'm doing a PhD, as I love to share my ideas with people, especially those who do not know my research, and how my research can make an impact on society.

You can find more info about this event, which I blogged at my research group's blog.

It's been a while since I've done this kind of thing, explaining my research, to outside the academic community. The last time I did this was when I was in Waterloo and I talked about my Masters thesis as part of the Bell Canada University Lab's FIRST program.

On Technorati: U of T, CS

Updated U of T Computer Science web site

I just got an e-mail from the chair of Computer Science at my university (University of Toronto), that the Computer Science web site is now updated. It certainly looks so much nicer than before, and just by browsing it, the information is much more richer and pleasing on the eyes.

This is what the Computer Science home page looked like before, courtesy of Google's cache. Compare that with now. Much better. Let's hope I can find the information that I'm looking for faster than before. It was well overdue that the Computer Science web site needed to be redesigned and overhauled. We have the KMDI and graphics and web people in our department, our web site should at least look somewhat decent! Certainly, we should be able to create a nice interface and data repository for content on our web site, with the expertise that we have. We should be putting on the newest technologies, like RSS feeds and links to featured research.

At least, this is a step in the right direction.

On Technorati: U of T CS, Computer Science